Tony Howard: Women as Hamlet. Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction

• Dieter Mehl

The subject of this fascinating study is the surprisingly colourful as well as exciting history of actresses’ challenging men’s monopoly of the part of Hamlet. The first attempts we know of were made as early as the middle of the 18th century when enterprising women took over the part of the prince because no suitable men were available for a particular production. Even the celebrated Mrs. Siddons, the century’s most famous Lady Macbeth and Portia, once played Hamlet out in the provinces, though never in London, where she appeared as Ophelia and Gertrude, among many other Shakespeare heroines. Tragic crossdressing was generally considered either a curiosity or a suspicious instance of female overambition, yet in the course of the nineteenth century, female Hamlets became more common, especially in North America, where crossdressing seems to have been less of a problem and where Charlotte Cushman (1816–76) was a most successful Romeo; she later added Hamlet to her repertoire which she acted for many years in several North American cities and also in Manchester and Dublin (unlike her Romeo, her Hamlet was not seen in London).

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